


Help Me To Name It

by th_esaurus



Category: Actor RPF, Call Me By Your Name (2017) RPF
Genre: M/M, Multi, Open Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 14:05:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11715912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: “I bet you bring all your coworkers to the middle of the forest to cook meat.”“Only the ones I like,” Armie says, gentle and mysterious.





	Help Me To Name It

**Author's Note:**

> i absolutely refuse to make an elizabeth chambers hammer tag, but suffice to say, i can't imagine thinking about armie/timmy without including liz as well.

Timothée feels pretty sure he knows how this goes down by now. He’s young(ish) and inexperienced(ish) but it has always been the same. A nervy few months of prep, a nice few weeks of filming; radio silence during the edit, and then he’d be flung together awkwardly with his castmates again for a trite round of promotion for a film nobody much would go see. Mostly he set dares with himself and his sister as to how stupid he could look for a photocall without getting singled out for it. He wore his sleeves too long, his bomber jackets too obnoxious, his stripes too loud. It’s an okay time.

Ansel had told him he should get a suit cut. Grey. Grey is cooler than black right now. “That sounds pretty boring,” Timothée shrugged. He hadn’t filmed any scenes with Ansel, but they’d been flung together for promo as the hot new things.

“I got a new one for the red carpet,” Ansel sniffed. “It cost my mom like three thousand bucks.”

“Neato,” Timothée told him. _Men, Women and Children_ didn’t really do that well anyway, so more fool to Ansel’s mom.

So, anyway, he spent two months in Crema with Armie, having a nice time; maybe more than nice. Maybe closer to life changing. But still, he assumes everything will go dark for half a year while they finish the cut. He will fly back to New York, and Armie will schmooze in California, already an established face on the Hollywood scene, and Timothée will have months and months and months to try and work out what this whole experience actually meant to him. What Armie actually means to him, now that they’ve, you know, kind of made love without doing the actual sex part.

What do you do when the last person you kissed disappears out of your life, all of a sudden?

Except, he’s only been back in Hell’s Kitchen for a week, when his phone buzzes, and it’s Armie, bright and loud on the end of the line.

“Timmy! Timo! Come over, we’re having a cookout.”

“What? When? Hi?”

“Hi! Tomorrow night. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon. Harper misses you. She misses your hair.”

“Wait, where are you?”

“San Antonio.” He says it like, _and what of it?_

“Armie, I don’t think I can just--”

“We'll find a flight. We’ll get you a seat. Say yes.” He can hear Armie’s beaming smile, and instantly craves the reality of it.

“Yes.”

“Atta boy. I’ll email you the flight details, Liz’s gonna pick you up at the airport. All chill?”

“All chill.”

And then Armie hangs up.

So maybe it’s not going to be quite so rote as it was every other time.

*

Armie picks him up in a gaudy Hummer, wearing capri pants and a t-shirt that’s old rather than expensively distressed, and Timothée jokes, “Why Mrs. Hammer, you look ravishing--”

He’s never flown anywhere on less than 48 hours notice before. He only has a rucksack with him. He feels unprepared, and had called his sister thirty minutes before boarding. “This is dumb, right?”

“You’re an _actor_ now,” she hits back. She pronounces it ack- _toor_ ; a glamorous and old world species. “Your whole life is gonna be dumb. Get on the fucking plane.”

No surprise, he got on the fucking plane.

“You’re a wag,” Armie says wryly, and Timothée has no idea what that means, but likes the sound of it. It could mean anything. He’s a rogue, an idiot, a comedian. “She’s at the bakery.”

This, too, could be a euphemism, for all Timothée knows.

He likes that Armie speaks so bluntly, accentuating with his hands, and yet knows a hundred thousand things Timothée can only guess at. The feeling, Timothée knows, is mutual: Armie had always been open-mouth fascinated at Timothée’s knowledge of European alternative music from the early nineties, half of which he’d dug out on vinyl in dank little record shops in the south of France before vinyl got cool again. Every time Timothée said something like, _oh, they split up before I was born,_ Armie would groan and grin and rub his face with his palms, agonised. “I’m so fucking ancient,” he’d say, barely twenty-nine.

They talked so easily, on set. Timothée wants it to be no different here. But he can’t put his mouth on Armie’s now and call it rehearsal.

Euphemisms.

They drive out to an anachronistic little bakery, pastel walls and garden furniture and bunting. Armie’s got a cool bag in the trunk full of raw animal hunks to throw on the grill later, and this looks like the kind of place where half the clientele daintily ask which menu items are gluten free. It’s certainly a juxtaposition. “This is--twee,” Timothée shrugs, faintly bemused.

“You asshole,” Armie chuckles. “It’s Elizabeth’s.”

“Like, her favourite?”

“No, it’s hers.” Armie looks down at him, and it’s the first time since Italy Timothée has felt the full brunt of Armie’s handsome gaze. He got so used to it, and now it’s fresh and raw. Yikes, his sister would say. She half spells it out: _why-eye-ikes!_ She’d say it whenever they saw someone obviously Timothée’s type: cute girls with full sleeve tattoos, cute boys with undercuts and rolled up jeans. He always hit her.

Armie was never obviously a _yikes,_ but he became one so easily.

“I never told you about Bird?” Armie says, shocked at himself.

“We were busy.”

“Ah. Being professionals.”

“Right,” Timothée says, and Armie smirks. Working hard; making out. Same difference, in their case.

They buy cupcakes and chocolate twists, longhorn-shaped cookies and a sky blue lollipop that comes out of an apothecary jar for Harper. Armie knows every employee by name. Timothée’s wearing a black oversized hoodie and needs a haircut and realises he sticks out like a far more sore thumb than Armie does, with his Texas-lite joviality.

“You must be Timmy,” the girl at the cash register says to him.

“Uhhh,” he says, caught off guard.

“Armie and Liz have told us so much about you,” she smiles.

It’s been two weeks since they wrapped. How much can Armie have gushed in two weeks? Impossible.

And yet, how many hours had he spent on the phone to his sister waxing lyrical about Armie, his softness, his talent? “Yeah, sure,” she’d said. “‘He’s got a _huge_ talent.’”

“His dick isn’t half bad either,” Timothée snapped back, and that shut her up. He’d flushed.

He had the most mortifying blush, all over the bridge of his nose and the back of his neck, and they’d done a couple of scenes naked, and it hadn’t been a big deal at the time, seemed perfectly normal, perfectly fine, so Armie had never ended up seeing that patchy pink blush on Timothée’s pale skin.

 _Don’t think about his dick while you’re holding his wife’s cupcakes,_ Timothée tries to tell himself.

“Onward ho,” Armie says, grinning, and they clamber back into the truck.

*

The ranch house - “Also Elizabeth’s,” Armie clarifies - is down a mile-long dirt road in the hills off a quiet highway. The valleys get shallower as the trees get taller, and the ranch itself is surrounded on all sides, completely secluded. The villas and farmhouses of Timothée’s childhood always had a shabby, rustic air, like they were made of piled-up cobblestones that had only stood the test of time out of sheer willpower. But this place is sturdy and young, no older than the 1950s, built of dark wood and someone’s grandfather’s sweat.

Elizabeth, white apron and hair pulled back into the tightest ponytail Timothée’s ever seen, greets them both with kisses on the porch: cheek for Timmy, lips for hubby. “I’m so glad you came, Timothée,” she says, winningly genuine.

“Well, you’re only a couple blocks away,” Timothée tells her, and she grins unapologetically.

He’s met her, what, twice? Once very briefly before they started filming, introductory hugs and Armie’s gushing effusion over Timothée to Elizabeth and vice versa; and once when she stayed with them in Crema for a week, during that retrospectively weird time when he and Armie were living in each other’s pockets, even off set. He remembers they had dinner, the three of them and Harper, who was in that stage of kidhood where she wouldn’t be kept still for love nor money, and Armie’s ankle had brushed against his the whole time, just casually, under the patio table as they ate mozzarella and farfalle.

 _Weird,_ Timothée thought afterwards.

His mind didn’t care to expand on _weird._

Elizabeth is, Timothée realises, super pregnant. Not ballooned, but a definite bump, all the more defined by the tie of her apron.

“Congrats,” he says, staring.

“That is what they say,” she says, sparky. “But on the downside this just means less effort from me and more food prep for you. To the kitchen, boys, chop chop!”

(Later that night, way later, after--all the things that are going to happen, or rather, the things that have happened before and are happening again, here, now, in San Antonio--Timothée mumbles against Armie’s mouth, “You’re gonna have another kid,” and Armie grins and kisses him again, sweet, like he’s thrilled at the fact he successfully had sex with his wife, and thrilled about being here with his tongue grazing Timothée’s bottom lip, and that the two things are in no way contradictory.

Anyway--)

The cookout is Armie, and Elizabeth, and Armie’s pal Nick, and Timothée. That’s it.

“I thought this was some big deal you dragged me out here for,” Timothée says.

“Grilling is always a big deal,” Armie corrects him. Then, casually: “I missed you, buddy. Wanted you here.”

“I bet you bring all your coworkers to the middle of the forest to cook meat.”

“Only the ones I like,” Armie says, gentle and mysterious.

See, Timothée used to think of acting as kind of like freelancing. You’re nice to the people you work with, while you’re working with them, and then you probably never see them again. He gets jovial birthday texts from Matthew McConaughey ever year, just because he’d turned eighteen on set, but that’s about the extent of it, with anyone much, outside of Timothée’s contractual obligations.  

He basically existed on that farm in the middle of nowhere with Kiernan for a month or so, and _she_ didn’t invite him to dinner two weeks after they wrapped.

He remembers, like, this one evening that feels a distant memory even though it was only just before they left Crema, which was only just before now. They had gone back, out of order, and filmed a few early scenes now that Armie and Timothée had their buzzing sexual tensions fully in the bag; but strictly no touching. No kissing. Just long takes with longer glances, heavy words, blocking like a dance where they brushed by so close to one another but never quite made contact.

And Armie had spent the night at Timothée’s after, the little rental apartment on the third floor of a wonky old building he was going to miss; and they’d made out. Not for work. Not for anything except its own sake. They’d just made out. “I wanted to do this all day,” Armie admitted, his mouth on Timothée’s neck.

In Crema, they had fallen in love. They’d been paid to do it, sure, but had done it nonetheless.

 _Weird,_ was all Timothée could ever think. His brain always sounded like his sister. _W-e-i-r-d. Why-eye-ikes._

But they aren’t in Crema now. They’re in the woods in the north end of San Antonio, with Armie’s wife three feet away and his daughter running around the clearing barefoot, the air full of meat-smoke and Timothée thousands of miles from home in the other direction.

So what are they meant to do?

The evening is warm, bordering on uncomfortable, but Armie brings out a huge ice bucket and fills it with beer and coke bottles, just out of the way of the heat of the barbecue, and they sit around it on logs like it’s a campfire. Armie makes a fucking mean chicken skewer. Elizabeth drinks a half glass of cabernet and mock-argues with her husband over it. “I told him,” she says, leaning over to Timothée and whispering, conspiratorially loud, “that I’ll quit drinking wine if he gives up lager and cigars.”

“Not a chance,” Armie crows.

Elizabeth shrugs at him: _you see what I put up with?_

Timothée feels like he’s being introduced to an in-joke he hasn’t quite figured out the punchline of yet.

There are solar lights on sticks stuck into the ground all around the garden, which twinkle into life after dark. Harper is put to bed, half asleep on Nick’s knee, at an irresponsible ten o’clock; Armie returns from tucking her in with two guitars that they swap between the four of them. Elizabeth is the first to admit she can’t play, and she’s right, but Timothée is effuse with his praise anyway. Makes them all laugh. He drinks another beer.

Timothée’s tipsy, and nervy about that. Bad with self-control, when he’s drunk.

At midnight, Nick says his goodbyes, shakes Timothée’s hand kindly.

Armie and Timothée pick cold burgers apart with their hands and eat them in chunks. “Vile,” Elizabeth says affectionately.

Their talk turns quiet, intimate. Lazily sketched details of the past two weeks, daydreams about the finished film, questions about the future Timothée dances around awkwardly. It’s harder to know what comes next when you haven’t quite made it.

“You will,” Armie says at once. “With this one? You will. You’re it, man. The whole world’s gonna see that.”

He’d said that on set, too. Lying in bed with Timothée in his arms while Luca checked the light levels between takes. “You don’t even know how good you are,” he’d whispered.

Armie is smiling at him now that same open way. Like they’re naked and in love, nothing to hide, nothing to lose.

“Lemme help clean up,” Timothée manages. He busies himself picking up napkins and empty bottles. The back of his neck is sweating, and it’s nothing to do with the Texas heat.

He wants to find somewhere private and call his sister. Tell her, a) they’re married, b) he’s an idiot, and c) this is a mistake. _What is?_ she’ll ask innocently, and he won’t be able to tell her what, because he doesn’t even know himself.

But instead, he rinses dirty plates under the running tap in the kitchen sink, and Armie bundles up behind him and wraps his arms around Timothée’s waist, and rests his forehead on his tense shoulder. Timothée has to go up on tip-toe for it to be even remotely comfortable for Armie to hold him like this, but he does it without even thinking.

He puts down his plates and grabs the rim of the farmhouse sink.

“Why--”

“Shh,” Armie says. Well at least he doesn’t want to question this either.

Timothée swallows. “Why did you bring me out here?”

“I wanted you here.”

“Really? Here? With your wife and kids?” It comes out mean, and Timothée turns round to make sure Armie isn’t insulted. Instead he looks--mind-boggled.

“Are you shitting me?” Armie says, half laughing. “You think I didn’t spend two months in Crema skyping my _wife_ about how bad I had it for you?”

Wait--

“She had dinner with us while I fucking played footsie with you under the table.”

Wait, _wait--_

“Timmy,” Armie says, somehow both paternal and deeply arousing. “This isn’t--we’re not--don’t worry about Liz, okay? She--fuck, she was fretting our bed wouldn’t be big enough for the three of us. Because of how we’re both giants, you know.”

“The three of us,” Timothée manages.

“If you wanted,” Armie says, all at once soft. His hands are still on Timothée’s hips, and the tap is still running, and when he leans over to turn it off, his whole chest presses up against Timothée’s body, squeezing a breath out of him that Timothée barely realised he’d been holding in.

“It really sucked,” Timothée says, stilted, “That I didn’t think I’d be able to kiss you again.”

 _Oh_ , Timothée thinks. _That’s what_ weird _meant._

“That definitely would suck,” Armie smiles, “if it were true.”

His mouth is--

So familiar.

*

Timothée means to sleep on the far side of the bed, just pressed up next to Armie, he really does, but Armie hops out of bed right after they all get settled, claiming he’s gotta pee, and when he comes back, Timothée ends up, as if they’re playing sardines, squeezed between the two of them. Husband and wife. Elizabeth’s nightdress is as soft as her smile.

“We all fit,” Timothée says, nervously.

“I’m so glad,” she murmurs, while Armie sweetly kisses the back of his neck.

*

Timothée wears black to Sundance, which his sister says is cheating. She buys him a gaudy purple jacket she picked up at a thrift store and has it shipped to him in Germany for the Berlinale, and he models it for Armie.

“You don’t think I should get, like, a grey suit?” he asks, turning around in front of their hotel room mirror.

“That sounds pretty boring,” Armie scoffs, and takes a photo of him, and sends it to Elizabeth.

She should be asleep, in California, but sends back a thumbs-up emoji immediately anyway.

“That’s what I thought,” Timothée agrees, smiling.


End file.
